"mac" entries

Wing Man — Mac app for source control management with git, implements workflow rather than simply being a wrapper for git commandlines.

CodeKit — Mac app for web developers, automates (invisibly, thanks to watching filesystem changes) much of the web site tools.

LazyTruth — Chrome plugin for gmail that detects bogus forwarded email and gives you the option to reply with the truth. RoboSnopes for the win! (via The Atlantic)

Verizon to Throttle Pirates (BBC) — unable to solve their business model problems though the courts, Hollywood “partners” with ISPs to extra-judicially punish alleged infractions. ISPs win when heavy downloaders are throttled, of course, because it lets them have higher contention ratios (sell the same upstream cable to many more downstream email-checking residences instead of just a few torrenters). These five ISPs are mall-cops, private tax collectors, and regional monopolists, all in one nasty bundle of evil.

Canada Wages War on Knowledge — Library and Archives Canada is ending acquisitions, not digitizing material, dispersing its collection to underfunded private and public collections around Canada, and providing little in the way of access to the scraps they did keep. Apparently Canada has been overrun by Huns and Vandals. Imminent sack of Toronto predicted. (via BoingBoing)

Cyberpunk Dress Code (BoingBoing) — what caught my eye was how many gadgets have been subsumed into the mobile phone.

Brief Intro to TPCK and SAMR (PDF) — slides from a workshop framing technology in education. SAMR particularly good: technology first Substitutes, then Augments (substitutes and improves), then Modifies (changing the task), and then finally Redefines (makes entirely new tasks possible).

Virtual CDRW — awesome Mac tool: gives you a fake CD/RW drive so when you have to play the burn/rip game to get music out of DRM, you don’t have to waste plastic.

History Repeats, Fuller Feeds, Open Source Dev, and The Long Sunset of Business Models

HP Emulates Next (BoingBoing) — In mid-1993, a few months after CEO Steve Jobs had shuttered the NeXT factory, and was in the process of switching to an all-software company—a path that led to its later acquisition by Apple—the lights were turned back on in its Fremont, Calif., factory. NeXTWorld’s rumor columnist, Lt. Sullivan, reported that the U.S. military and another undisclosed customer wanted more machines, and so NeXT was to fire up and spit 1,200 more devices out.

FeedsAPI — service that turns a feed of partial posts into a full feed.

Cinderella — a fully managed development environment for open source hacking on Mac OSX. It’s powered by homebrew and chef. You only need Xcode to get started. (via One Thing Well)

The Greenwich Time Lady (Futility Closet) — the old and the new coexist. From 1836 to 1940, this one company sold the time to people; their pocketwatch was certified by Greenwich Observatory in the morning and for the rest of the day they charged to look at it. New technology, government standards, and plenty of competition didn’t end the business instantly. Compare to Clay Shirky’s That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.

Designing Github for Mac — a retrospective from the author of the excellent Mac client for github. He talks about what he learned and its origins, design, and development. Remember web development in 2004? When you had to create pixel-perfect comps because every element on screen was an image? That’s what developing for Cocoa is. Drawing in code is slow and painful. Images are easier to work with and result in more performant code. Remember these days? This meant my Photoshop files had to be a lot more fleshed out than I’ve been accustomed to in recent years. I usually get about 80% complete in Photoshop (using tons of screenshotting & layer flattening), then jump into code and tweak to completion. But with Cocoa, I ended up fleshing out that last 20% in Photoshop.

Feedback Loops (Wired) — covers startups and products that use feedback loops to help us change our behaviour. The best sort of delivery device “isn’t cognitively loading at all,” he says. “It uses colors, patterns, angles, speed—visual cues that don’t distract us but remind us.” This creates what Rose calls “enchantment.” Enchanted objects, he says, don’t register as gadgets or even as technology at all, but rather as friendly tools that beguile us into action. In short, they’re magical. (via Joshua Porter)

Multi-tenant SaaS Checklist — if you’re used to building single-site web apps, this is a simple overview of the differences when building multi-tenanted web apps. Nominally about Java, ending with a plug for its author’s product, but ignore all that and it’s still useful. (via Abhishek Tiwari on Twitter)

Angel Investing: My First Three Years (Paul Buchheit) — interesting to see how it stacks up for him. What caught my eye was The more great YC companies there are, the more reasons there are for other smart founders to join YC–the clever feedback loop in YC, where graduates help the newbies, builds its quality and increases its first-mover advantage year after year. (via Hacker News)

A Musing About 2011 and an Un-National Generation (JP Rangaswami) — The emerging generations want to use services independent of location of “origin” and location of “delivery”. Attempts to create artificial scarcity (by holding on to dinosaur constructs like physical-location-driven identity) are being responded to by a whole slew of spoofing and anonymisation tools; as the law becomes more of an ass in this context, you can be sure that the tools will get better. Living in a country other than America brings this home.

Wireless Hacks, Real Time Web, 3D Christmas, Mac Sync

DD-WRT — replacement firmware for cheap wireless router boxes that add new functionality like wireless bridging and quality-of-service controls (so Skype doesn’t break up while you’re web-browsing). Not a new thing, but worth remembering that it exists.

Shortly after installing Snow Leopard I saw the first evidence of the new location services built into the operating system. I got the new version of Clarke, a Fire Eagle updater. After the install a window appeared that asked me if I wanted to share my location with an application. Finally! So how is Apple doing it? The same they do on the iPhone.